MBA1439 How Do Your Customers Decide to Buy?

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Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, the business podcast that gives you more value each minute with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn how do your customers decide to buy? This is a question I've been asking for our business for a bit recently. What's the process of buying our product or service for our ideal customer? How long does it take for them to actually make that decision to buy from the moment they heard about us? Why is it so important? Well, understanding how your customer buys allows you to really maximize that process. Rather than going against the grain and doing things that really go against that process, you're going to do things that go along with that process that helps them through that process. Whether it's changing your homepage, nurturing them through an email sequence, offering a free trial or a free month, you're not going to know what to do if you don't know how they buy. In today's lesson, I'll be sharing with you some strategies I'm implementing in our business to find out how our customers buy so we can be able to make the right changes Instead of just changing things and hoping for the best, we're going to find out. We're going to get into our customers heads and really understand the experience of becoming one of our customers. This is going to be incredibly insightful and helpful for you to increase your sales. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Think about the last time you shopped for something when you made a decision about a purchase. This could be a personal purchase, this could be a business purchase, it could be a pair of sneakers, it could be a piece of furniture, your next car, or a piece of software to help you in your business. I want you to think about it, write it down, write down those things that you bought and I want you to remember what was the process that you went through to make that decision to buy that product. Let me give you an example. Rerun these 30 day challenges at webinar ninja. And they are basically a 30 day online course which allows our students to have an actual result at the end of the 30 days. Our current one is called the Automated Webinar Challenge. If you're interested in checking it out, it's webinar ninja.com AWC. And in order for me to run this, I needed a course platform. Well, I needed a solution to host this course so I can have an access area for all our members when they sign up for the challenge so they can watch these videos and download materials and go back to it whenever they wanted. Now, I had a few options. I could have built it myself, I could have used some sort of WordPress plugin on top of our site, or I could have went with any of the course platform options. And I was looking at a few. There was teachable, there was thinkific, there was Podia. And at the end I chose to go with Podia. But I had to ask myself for this exercise, what were the steps that led me to that decision as a buyer? Did I just Google course platform or course software and just clicked on the first thing I saw on Google and bought immediately? No, it actually took me weeks to make this decision. And for many businesses and products, weeks is actually a short amount of time. And yet many of our websites are asking people to buy from the moment they land. Our website. We're asking for the sale really quickly when the reality is they're not going to buy the moment they land on your website. Why are we asking this? This is a little bit counterintuitive. We know that's not how people buy. But what do they do? They gather information and that's what I did. I actually had a list of must haves, I had a list on my notebook. I need to have these options, these features, so I can be able to run my course properly. I need to drip feed the content, I need to be able to have email notifications, I need to be able to upload the videos in one place. And I shortlisted all the different options and I landed on putty or decided on putty because at the end, after I looked at all my options, they fulfilled my needs the best. Now, to be quite honest, it took me a bit of time and a bit of work. I had to research and go to feature pages and look the whole site and sometimes even chat with their customer support to get some information before I made that decision. Now, even though Podia and the other course platforms have a free trial, I never signed up for the trial to make the decision. I actually signed up after I made the decision to go with Podia. Very interesting, right? You would think the free trial's purpose is to give people a chance to try it out and see if they like it. But that's not what happened. My process didn't include, hey, try these things out and see what I like, because it's a lot of work to try it out, to actually put my course on their platform and, and I wanted to make the decision first which platform I wanted to go with and then do all the work. This is really an important point here. Look at your own business, your own product. How much time and effort would it take for your customer to try you out? If it's going to take some time to set up, if it's going to take more than 30 minutes to get going, then it's an investment of time and effort. And maybe your idea of a free trial is not really necessary or needed. This is something that you need to understand about your product. How long it takes to set up. Are people really going to be using this free trial? Most people that sign up for products that take a while to set up, like a course platform or in my case, webinar Ninja, a webinar platform, we have a free trial, but does it even make sense? This is something I'm questioning now. Maybe we're better off with a free plan or maybe a sandbox area where people can try out the software. The point is, is that is my product, is my website aligned with the way people buy? Now, how do you find out what that process is? Well, somebody like Podia would love to hear my story, to know how I got to that and you need to do the same. So one of the things we're going to be implementing is a automatic survey that's going to be offered to our users inside their app after they've been a customer for a week. After they're a week. We would love to hear, while it's fresh in their head, how they became a customer. So we're going to offer a survey, we're going to offer an incentive like a $10 gift card. If they do this survey, just, you know, thank them for their time and it's going to ask them questions like, how did you hear about us? How long did it take to make the decision to go with us after you've heard about us? What did that process look like? What was the deciding factor? Questions like this. This is going to be a short, 5, 6 question survey. Just so I can understand what happened. How did I acquire this customer and what was the buyer's journey? One of the other things you want to find out is how long it took for them to actually become a buyer. And you can actually find that out through data. So you can actually tag your customers in your CRM when they become custom and just find out when was that tag applied? If they're on your email list because they're on your newsletter, if they joined a webinar or they signed up for some sort of freebie, they could have been on your list for a year or more before they've converted to a customer. You need to know how long it takes for them to get acquainted with your product before they become a customer, because this is going to affect the way you nurture them and get them to become a customer and double down on what works. A lot of us were trying so hard to just close the sale when, hey, this is how long it takes, is how long it takes. Let's just get more people and nurture them and make sure they decide to go with us and not our competitors. Another thing I've done in the past, what I'll do more of is customer interviews. It's just reaching out to random customers that have been with us for a bit of time, not that long, maybe a few weeks or a month, and asking them, having a conversation, 10 minute conversation about why they chose us, what was their buying journey like, and taking down notes and understanding how they become customers. A lot of us, we don't want to talk to our customers because we don't want to bother them or we feel like it's maybe some sort of a interaction. We're Trying to avoid because of confrontation. What if they're they give me feedback that that's gonna hurt me, it's okay. It's always a pleasant experience. In my experience, they may give you some feedback, but that's great. That makes your product better. And you'll be surprised how willing your customers are are to speak to you, the founder of the company, to give their advice, to give their feedback. There's nothing like talking to your customers directly to find out why they chose you. When you're collecting this information or getting on calls, you want to make it as easy as possible for your customers. Whether it's a multiple choice question, whether there's only one or two open ended questions, you want to make sure that they don't have to jump through hoops to fill out the survey. It's like right inside of your app or your product or via email. If you're sending them a call, use a simple calendar app like Calendly or Acuity Scheduling where they just click on a link and they book a time with you. And please show up early for those meetings. You don't want them waiting. Video calls are super simple these days and you could set that up with your calendar app. You want to hear from a good number of your customers. So even if you hear from 1% of your customers, so say for example, you have a thousand customers, that's 10 people understanding their journey and how they became customers. That's a valuable information. Of 10,000, that's 100 customers. You get through a survey great, but you want some critical data. Data is a huge stress relief. Why? Because it backs up your decisions. You know that the next move, your next decision, your next change to your website or your buying process, or if you offer a free trial or not, or a free plan is backed by data, by information you actually gathered that you know for a fact. This is how people buy. This is going to be a huge stress reliever for you.

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Understanding your buyer's journey is incredibly important. Yes, you can find out something through software, whether you're using something like Segment or heatmaps or like I mentioned, tagging and tools in your CRM. But there's a lot of things you can't know because they're not taking actions that you can track yet. For example, you could say, hey, I know exactly how long it takes somebody to become a customer from the moment they join our email list. But what about before they join your email list? What about when they're just browsing your website? What about when they just heard about you at a conference? What about when they're just googling you and reading things or reading forms or reading reviews or watching video reviews or whatever it is? There are certain things you just don't know unless you talk to a customer. Somebody could have heard of you and thought about you or heard you speak at an event a year ago, but only decided to buy last week. And you think they just heard about you and checked out immediately because they just bought last week? No, you gotta get the full story. And that's why gathering the information straight from your customer and is so important. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now. It's the best thing you could do for us to keep the show going. Because, hey, by hitting subscribe, you show your support. You show the podcast app that you're using that I love this show. Give me more of it when the next episode is available. Also, if you have a minute, leave us an iTunes rating and review or rate us on whatever app you love to use. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. With every customer base, you're going to have some raving fans, people that love your product and love giving you feedback, love communicating with you. Don't be afraid to tap into that well and more than once, you may ask them other questions about your product. You may have questions about their onboarding experience or their overall satisfaction with their product or service. They are willing to help. So go for it. Ask some questions. Find out. These people are loyal, happy fans and I say ask until they say, hey, I'm too busy. It's all good, especially when you make it easy on them. When you're asking those questions, when you're asking for their input for their journey through a survey, through a call, you're making that effort to take minimal time from them. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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